Hi !
Welcome back. It's been a while since the last post as I have been super busy with the school project! I'm back at school doing the master program in Visual Communication at Konstfack in Stockholm since 2017 and this year is my last year(hopefully) for the course.
This project is one of my exam projects during the first year of studying. I got the assignment to re-design the previous work that repeating the stereotypes, I picked the 'UMAMI' illustration.
UMAMI illustration
Back in 2016, I was working as illustrator for a food magazine. The task is to produce monthly illustration for the column called 'food facts'. The articles in that column are about the facts in food which are normally science-based but easy to digest for audiences, therefore, the illustration is the visual language that helps audiences to engage in the texts.
The key brief for the total look of illustration:
- Fantasy & Fairy tales
- Make food looks very tasty
- Cute but smart : in order to engage readers but also hide some gimmicks
The thing is that when I portray the cuteness, it seemed that I kept producing the same images of a girl in the kitchen. A decent White girl who looks sweet, shy, submissive wearing pinkish costumes like a skirt/apron.
I had to reset my mindset and the ways of seeing images.
Resetting my default status of creating illustration in these terms :
- Gender roles
- Stereotypes in ethnicities.
- Euro-centrism.
Images below are the process of this work, please enjoy!
So I started to re-design the character not to repeat the stereotype of a decent girl in the kitchen. A sporty girl or even boy can cook!
Adding a diversity in the picture.
The result!
Thanks for watching!
Feel free to share (with credits please!) and leave comment!
:)